1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to testing of host bus adapters and, in particular, to testing for proper recovery of a host bus adapter when a cable break occurs. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a method and apparatus for automatically performing cable breaks for host bus adapter testing.
2. Description of the Related Art
Fibre Channel is a high-speed transport technology used to build storage area networks (SANs). Fibre Channel can be configured point-to-point, via a switched topology, or in a Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FCAL) with or without a hub, which can connect up to 127 nodes. Fibre Channel supports transmission rates up to 2.12 Gbps in each direction.
A Fibre Channel host bus adapter is typically connected to one or more storage modules by a cable. If the connection is broken, then data may not be properly written to or read from the storage modules. Host bus adapters may be designed to recover from cable breaks. However, testing the recovery of adapters is difficult. An operator may test the host bus adapter by manually pulling the cable from the connector in the adapter. However, this is time consuming and does not utilize the time and effort of engineers or technicians in a positive and cost-effective manner. Cable connections may also be broken by using relays. However, relays are not well suited for use with 2 Gbps Fibre Channel signals.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide an improved method and apparatus for automatically performing cable breaks for testing host bus adapters.